Navca's Joe Irvin: Getting stuck in for the social sector

Irvin says Navca members are worried about the impact of the next local government settlement.

A couple of weeks into his new role as Navca's chief executive, Joe Irvin is back in Whitehall, to meet civil servants at several government departments. This is where he spent the best part of a decade and a half as chief of staff to John Prescott and head of Gordon Brown's political office in No 10. Yet he rejects any suggestion that his former roles might make coalition ministers wary of him now. "We're all professionals. I'm now the chief executive of a registered charity and have stepped right back from any overt political activity."

"In my second week, I saw Nick Hurd, who's our contact minister in the government, and had a very positive meeting with him. Along with NCVO, I managed to put to Eric Pickles what was going on in Notts County Council and he's now agreed, which he hadn't before, to write to them to admonish them over breaching statutory best value guidelines with a 34% cut in support for the voluntary sector. I've also intervened in the debate on the Work Programme and the relationship between the private sector providers and local charities. I've got stuck in."

Irvin says his members – local voluntary sector councils, who represents 150,000 smaller local and community organisations – are worried about the impact of the next local government settlement.

"They're all waiting a bit anxiously about the local government budgets that are being set. And they all have retrenched over the last couple of years. I think a quarter of their staff have gone. If you want to look at the green shoots, I would say, the ones that are doing it well have worked closely with their local authorities, the police, health services to see how they can get through all this and still keep the services for the people who matter, the people they're serving.

"Some of them have merged together, some have brought together a whole series of advice centres, from the voluntary sector and local government, in one place. Some of them are looking at new ways of sustaining themselves, there's a bit of reinvention going on and in the good places and where there's dialogue with the people they work with, then there's going to be better protection for the people working at the front line, rather than places where there have been big rows like Nottinghamshire county council."

Despite some pessimism about the immediate future, he sounds a cautiously positive note about the medium-term: "The big reason to be cheerful is that underlying this downturn, there's a growing need for what the voluntary sector does – an ageing population, different social attitudes, social networks – and I think there's a growing recognition in the public which is reflected by politicians, "big society", 'Blue Labour' and whatever, of how important it is these days. And it's only going to grow in the future"

Yet he warns that there's no magic solution to the funding difficulties which his members, and the organisations they support, are facing.

"There's isn't one single thing which is going to replace all the cuts, there's nothing of that kind. Some organisations are working together more efficiently. I think the danger is that you see one bright shiny object and you think that's going to be the solution to everything – it's all going to be solved by new social bonds or new philanthropic giving, or everybody's going to be trading, in quite a tight market, if you like. So you've got more and more people moving into a market with a less and less wealthy set of customers. And that's not going to work for everybody, is it?"

"Unfortunately, there isn't one silver bullet. It's going to be a whole range of things, of people getting through. And they're probably going to be doing a bit less than they have been able to do, because there are fewer resources. But if they can keep an eye on five years' time, and ten years' time, they'll come out of it in good shape, so that they can go back to doing more in future."

Irvin also echoes his predecessor's concerns about voluntary organisations becoming too dependent on contracts to deliver public services.

"We as voluntary organisations have got to keep our minds clear about what we're about. I can think about examples from the past from the 1980s where big charities who almost became businesses for delivering the Youth Training Scheme and then when unemployment went down and the scheme wound down, they were left wondering what they were there for in the first place, which might have been helping a very specific group of people. So you've got keep your eyes on what you're actually about and not keep chasing all sorts of hares in order to keep yourself sustained and lose track of that, and get diverted to something else."

It's clear that Irvin, who has spent much of his career either in government or dealing with it from a corporate or voluntary sector background, sees public service delivery as vital to the future of social sector and a new approach from commissioners to it as crucial.

"I think local councils, councillors and people involved at a local council probably do understand what the social sector can do. They see it, they know friends and family who are doing it and they've probably done a bit of it themselves. So I think the chance they understand it are quite good. What's difficult is for them to absorb a new way of working, which we're all going to have to deal with.

"Commissioning is not the same as payment by contracts. You may decide to commission something and then decide to deliver it through grants, then you keep people accountable by attaching conditions to the grant and withdrawing it at the end if they're not delivering. You can do it by contract, you can do it by a more complicated social investment vehicle. So they've got to decide what's best. And here's the danger with the Work Programme. It has ended up with 20 big private companies running the show. There's an indirect relationship to the voluntary sector and others who are providing a lot of the direct training and help. So that's a new world. If you design the thing well, you're going to give the possibility of smaller local organisations taking part."

This is what he sees as Navca's key role – helping organisations to work together to thrive in a new world.

"If each of those little organisations had to write their own bids, write their own constitutions, sort out the premises they might have, sort out an HR policy, it would be a nightmare – they'd never get on with what they want to do. They didn't come into the charity world to do that. You need an organisation that can do all that, that can be an effective voice for them and to the power that be, whether they're local authorities or others. So I think making that work is even more essential now for the delivery, for the smaller organisations. We've got training programmes and workshops going round the country now about how you can deal with commissioning, can you come together to make yourself big enough to go in for some of that. Actually, do you want to influence commissioners rather than deliver services? For a lot of charities, that is what they want to do.

As an advocate of collaboration, Irvin maintains that he's happy to practice what he preaches, by working with the other umbrella organisations.

"We are stronger together than we are apart. That kind of collective support that CVSs can give to thousands of local charities is really important and will be more important in austere times. It also means I want to work really positively with the other sister organisations, NCVO and others, and have a really good positive relationship with them. And the second thing is, as we're the national voice for local charities, is to get the message over that the big society only works if the little society works as well."